son. I cooked supper for him; I read to him; I scolded him about his homework, not as a teacher but in a parental way; and after kissing his forehead and smoothing his duvet, I perched in his room on the hard chair, in the penumbra, as the jazz musicians paraded brightly around the wall, watching the gentle rise and fall of his small bundled self until he fell asleep.
It was new, then, this thing with Reza, and it made me love Sirena all the more because it seemed almost a biblical gift. It really felt as though Sirena had bestowed upon me the flesh of her flesh, and I was savoring it most richly, still new, when all of a sudden there came, unbidden, another: the blueprint, unfolded.
“What do you think?” she asked me. She put her hand on me, of course. She looked up at me with the famous almond eyes, wide. “Does it look like—what do you think? Is it a land of reason and a land of marvels at the same time?”
How to answer, when mostly I was feeling the hand? And wondering, as I always did, what I felt about the hand.
“It’s a map.”
She clicked her tongue. “You mustn’t tease me. There is a map, there are the furnishings for my world”—she gestured at the bags and boxes—“but now there are other, bigger things to build. The island itself, if you like.” She sighed. “It doesn’t entirely make sense, because in Paris the shape of the space is different, not long and narrow but more a strangely divided rectangle. I’ll make it like a pathway, a journey. But I must build it here first, to see, obviously for the scale of it, but also to get started on the video.”
This was her big idea. She wanted to build a version of her Wonderland in the studio, she said, so that the Appleton kids—my Appleton kids, my third-grade class—could come and discover it. She would film their discovery. This was her plan. After that she might make other videos, she hoped, but the one she cared about was the kids. “And here’s the thing, you see, Nora, my dear: I cannot build the Wonderland, and I cannot make the video, without you.” She crinkled her eyes, her mouth, in her most endearing smile. “You know this, don’t you? After all our conversations.” She sighed. “I never worked before with the help of anybody. But you—with your help, we will make something wonderful—a wonderful Wonderland!”
“Yes, sure—” I felt so many things at once. Chief among them excited; but also, afraid. Yet again, some boundary was being broken. I would let it break, because I wanted to; but what would it mean, to bring my kids—to bring her kid, our kid—here?
She was already imagining it: “The Jabberwocky, to go—in English?”
“Snicker snack.”
“Yes, the Jabberwocky, his eyes, eyes of light in the darkness—the suggestion of monstrosity, it’s better.”
“I guess.”
“Because then it is each person’s monstrosity, yes? You see? I don’t tell you what is monstrous, just like I don’t tell you what to love. I simply allow you to imagine.” She had taken her physical self back into herself, arms crossed over her chest, her shawl clutched round, but still, the smile. “Because each of us has our own fantasies, our own nightmares.”
“True.”
“What is for me perfection, you don’t even think twice about.”
“You never know—”
“You never know. Exactly. So we must keep the doors as open as possible, let as many fantasies come into Wonderland as we can. So that everyone can see themselves there.”
“Wonderland always seemed to me like a pretty scary place when I was a kid.”
“Yes! Scary, but we want to be scared.”
“I guess.”
“With mirrors and lights—like children, we want all the emotion, good, bad, and then poof, we want the emotion to go away again. We will do this, for the children, for Reza’s classroom, when you bring them here …”
“It depends, surely—”
“Because in the end, we want above all to be safe, yes? Almost everybody wants this in the end.”
We stood over her map of Wonderland and she told me that she couldn’t build it without my help. She wanted to bring together two different ideas of wonder, one imaginary and one spiritual. On the one hand, she had her story about a boy, then a man, raised alone on an island, and of his solitary discovery of science, and of spiritualism, culminating in his worship of a God he’d come to believe in absolutely—a